Peter Varga on ESOP Taxation at the Flagship Event for SLOVCA 2023

The topic of ESOPs has long been a theme of the Highgate Group. From a tax, legal as well as practical/commercial point of view. The founders of Highgate Group, Tomas Demo and Peter Varga, who are entrepreneurs themselves and directly set up various ESOP schemes for Highgate Group clients, also from a practical point of view. Thus, Peter Varga recently featured on a panel with Jaroslav Bukovin of VAIA and Tomas Bury of Allen & Overy on the topic of ESOPs at the Flagship event organized by the Venture Capital Association SLOVCA.

The Highgate Group is very much involved in the subject of ESOPs. Peter Varga’s well-known LinkedIn status (found here) has sparked further discussions and possibly even legislation effective from 2024. While the latter does not reflect all of the technical problems of the amendment in question, it at least addresses the fundamental schism between the ambition of the ESOP amendment and the ability of its language to bring about a general consensus on its content.

Conferences on ESOPs

The Highgate Group has already organized three ESOP conferences. The first back in 2019, when the topic gradually filled the social space. In addition to lectures by Petr Varga and Tomáš Demo, it was actively attended by stalwarts of the Slovak venture capital world, namely Juraj Vaculík, Jaroslav Ľupták and Viktor Mikulášek.

In 2022, we organized a huge conference for IT and digital companies, where one of the topics was ESOP and a lecture by Petr Varga and Tomáš Dema on this topic.

However, given the dramatically evolving practice in this direction, the topic of ESOPs required a more comprehensive presentation, and so we decided to organize a separate conference on this topic alone in 2023. The sold-out HubHub (approx. 100 people) was a clear proof that this topic is the topic not only of startups, but of a critical part of Slovak companies.

If you are interested in this topic, please do not hesitate to contact us.